The file format known as “Hypertext Markup Language” (HTML), which is used for developing Web pages, is optimized for displaying data objects and not describing the underlying data format associated with the data object. Therefore, even though the data object is visible to the user in the Web page, application programs that wish to make use of the data object displayed on the Web page may have trouble interpreting the data. This is due to the fact that application programs are unable to interpret the context of how data is used in a Web page because HTML does not define the “data type” of the data objects. For example, a character string may be displayed in an HTML document as “3-9-00.” The character string may represent a number, a date, an identification number, or a part of a larger number within the document. Because the character string is stored in HTML format in the Web page, the application program in which the character string is to be imported may not be able to interpret the character string correctly. For instance, if the character string is imported into a spreadsheet program, the spreadsheet program may interpret the character string “3-9-00” as a date, when the character string may actually be an identification number. Therefore, the meaning of the data would be misinterpreted by the spreadsheet program, which may lead to a result that is different from what the user expects.
Another problem encountered with importing data from an HTML document into an application program is that the information displayed in the HTML document may only be a subset of the actual data. Typically, the Internet's bandwidth and response time limit the amount of data that may be transferred at any given time. Therefore, large amounts of data may be broken down into smaller subsets, or “pages” of data to be downloaded separately. For example, suppose a user wishes to search the Internet for all sites that include information about snow skiing. When the search is complete, the number of “hits,” or sites relating to snow skiing that the search uncovered may be too large to present to the user at one time on a single Web page. Therefore, the results of the search may be stored at a remote server. The search results would then be parsed into multiple “pages,” with each page containing a predefined number of sites. The “pages” may then be displayed one at a time to the user. However, if the user wanted to import the entire search results into an application program, such as a spreadsheet or database, the user would typically have to load each page individually and save the contents separately. Depending on the size of the search results, this process would be tedious and time consuming, which can lead to errors and frustration on the part of the user.
Thus, there is a general need in the art for an improvement to the HTML file structure to allow data objects in an HTML document to be imported into application programs, such that the original context, or data type, of the data object is preserved. There is a still a further need in the art for a method of redirecting application programs to an alternative location to retrieve the underlying data associated with the data objects displayed in the HTML document.